Transcript

SHELDON YETT: The big issues is that we want to make sure that mothers can get their children vaccinated and can find the supplies they need in health centres when they go there. When you go to a country like Vanuatu, it's a very remote country. It's island after island after island surrounded by miles and miles of open sea, and often you have stock outs. And when you have stock outs you have a lack of confidence in the system itself. What we want to do is to see if we can use drones to improve the predictability of supplies to make sure that vaccines can get safely to health centres when they're needed and in a way that they're still usable as vaccines. Right now if health centres need to be restocked, somebody has to get in a boat and sometimes go for hours in open ocean to get there. And that means there are often storms or there are often issues, a health worker doesn't show up, a vaccine doesn't show up, and a mother shows up and finds that there are no vaccines in stock. So if we can find a way to safely and predictably get vaccines to the health centre without putting somebody in an open boat to go across treacherous seas, then we're ahead of the game.

JAMIE TAHANA: Is the technology there?

SY: We're not sure yet. We've experimented around the world in other places with blood samples and with other medical items, but never in the context of the Pacific. The Pacific is very different - it's open water. The weather can be very unpredictable, there are very large areas of unmapped and relatively difficult areas to navigate, so it's not quite the same thing. The other issue is that we're trying to do this with vaccines. Vaccines are different from other medical supplies because they have to be kept cold. So we don't know if the technology is there yet, but we intend to find out.

JT: OK so you need something more advanced than, you know, strapping a chilly bin to a drone and sending it off. It would need to be specially made or something.

SY: That's right, it's not the same as delivering pizzas in the United States. So delivering vaccines in the context of the Pacific is very difficult, very problematic, but essential for saving the lives of children.

JT: But a trial of a medical drone has been done somewhere in Africa, hasn't it? How did that go?

SY: Yes, UNICEF has done trials in a number of countries - in Rwanda, we've done it in Malawi, but never in this neighbourhood and never with vaccines. So we're learning from each trial, we're learning that it can be done, but it isn't as simple as it seems and it takes a while to perfect the technology. We don't want to go forward with something as sensitive as vaccines until we're sure we can get it right.

JT: How far into this are you?

SY: Well if all goes well contracts will be issued in March of next year. We have a long road to traverse before that. First we need to trial the technology, and then by July we'll go to a second phase of trials sometime by the end of the year, and hopefully by roughly a year from today we'll have our first contracts out to try delivering vaccines in one province in Vanuatu.